Please, sir, who are you going to call when you want a good Ghostbusters game? Here is the answer to that question: you are going to call these games.

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) - Commodore 64/Various

The first - and for many, still the best - Ghostbusters game was released initially for the C64. Created by Activision's David "Pitfall" Crane, it began life as a top-down car game, entitled Car Wars.

When Activision acquired the movie licence, the in-development game was adapted to Ghostbusters - the majority of the work completed before Crane had even sat down to watch the movie. Which he did while - coincidentally - living in a spooky crane called David Ghostbuster.

It was a weird mix of styles, mind; resource management, the aforementioned top-down driving, and a side-on ghost-catching stage, where players had to corral ghosts into their haunted cranny. Seemingly everyone loved it at the time, though I never quite knew what I was supposed to be doing. At the time, I remember most being impressed by the faithful reproduction of the famous theme music.​In 1988 the game was ported to the NES, and featured this ending screen:

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS (1987) - Arcade

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon was so called following a dispute with He-Man production company Filmation - who had produced a mostly bad live-action 1975 TV series called The Ghost Busters (who featured among their number a gorilla called Tracy).

To avoid any litigation, The Real Ghostbusters became the official cartoon of the movie series (even having a dig at The Ghost Busters in one episode, which featured a team of rival ghost hunters).

This arcade version - later ported to home systems - was a basic top-down, three-player shooter. It was released subsequently in Japan without the licence, under the name Labyrinth Hunter G. What did the "G" stand for? "Gravy"!

GHOSTBUSTERS II (1990) - Amiga/PC

There were a couple of games based upon slightly-less-loved-than-the-original Ghostbusters II - the PC version differed substantially from the home computer incarnations. Both, however, featured sequences inspired by the sequel, albeit rendered with different gameplay and graphics.

​The home computer versions boasted a number of side-on proton 'em up stages, and an isometric 3D level. The PC release threw in some subtle business simulation elements. Because kids bloody love those. They love the business.

GHOSTBUSTERS II (1990) - NES

The most notable features of the NES Ghostbusters II game were its notoriously hard difficulty, and the lack of a standard pause feature. If you needed the lavatory mid-game, you were required to either accept your defeat, or perform a big dirty mess in your pants.

NEW GHOSTBUSTERS II (1990) - NES/Game Boy

One of the few NES/Game Boy games which - barring the obvious colour differences, and some tweaks to the levels - were essentially identical on both systems. New Ghostbusters II is the only Ghostbusters game to date to feature a playable Louis "R.Moranis" Tully (albeit only on the NES version).

​That's pretty interesting, right? Frankly, it's getting harder to distinguish these games apart, so we're clutching at anything to hand.

GHOSTBUSTERS (1990) - Mega Drive

Unrelated to the original Activision game, and boasting an original storyline. the Mega Drive interpretation of Ghostbusters featured super-deformed caricatures of the three white Ghostbusters as they went about their bustin'.

​For reasons that can only be put down to short-sightedness/institutionalised racism, Winston Zeddemore wasn't featured as a playable character.

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS (1993) - Game Boy

A puzzle-based platformer, the Game Boy version of The Real Ghostbusters was a thinly-disguised reworking of Kemco's Crazy Castle series (which featured various Disney and Warner Bros. cartoon characters). It was also rebranded as Garfield Labyrinth in Europe, and as a Mickey Mouse game in Japan.

​You know: because of the obvious parallels between those three properties...

EXTREME GHOSTBUSTERS (2001) - Game Boy Color

Based upon the short-lived cartoon of the same name, Extreme Ghostbusters featured a team of younger, more diverse, ghost hunters: goth girlKylie, wheelchair-bound Garett, African American genius Roland, and Latino slacker Eduardo. Gameplay was famously a bit on the wrong side of rubbish.

EXTEME GHOSTBUSTERS: CODE ECTO-1 (2002) - Game Boy Advance

Part platformer, part shoot 'em up, part driving game; by now these were the default ingredients of a Ghostbusters game, and Code Ecto-1 didn't disappoint in that regard.

​Did they not consider that, at some indeterminate future point, somebody might want to write a list of all the Ghostbusters games, and need to find something different to say about all of them?

EXTREME GHOSTBUSTERS: THE ULTIMATE INVASION (2004) - PlayStation

At last! A departure from all the other Ghostbusters games to date, The Ultimate Invasion was an on-rails first-person shoot 'em up, compatible with the Gun Con light gun.

​The graphics made a fair stab at the cartoon's hand-drawn style, but overall it wasn't very good. It nevertheless held the distinction of being one of but a handful of games to work with that scarcely-justified peripheral.

GHOSTBUSTERS: THE VIDEO GAME (2009) - Various

Released to generally decent reviews, Ghostbusters: The Video Game was co-written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, who had written (and starred in) the original movies.

With the blessing of Ghostbusters' creators, it was able to gather vocal contributions from much of the main cast (the notable exceptions being Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis). Dan Ackroyd described it as "essentially the third movie".

With an original storyline, an original central character, and a mix of first and third-person gameplay, it expanded on the first movie's backstory, and included elements that Ackroyd and Ramis had intended for the never-completed Ghostbusters 3: Hellhound.

​These included exploring the history of that movie's librarian ghost, and a return for Gozer, this time as a sharp-suited businessman.

GHOSTBUSTERS: SANCTUM OF SLIME (2011) - Various

A return to the top-down multiplayer action of The Real Ghostbusters arcade game, Sanctum of Slime was, in short, rubbish. And that's it. Spent. Done. Let us hope that all this bustin' made you feel good.

I bloody loved the first one, so many hours spent playing this on my Commodore 64. And of course, pressing spacebar over and over again during the opening credits!

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Picston Shottle

11/7/2016 04:12:41 pm

Yep - had the first one for Speccy. I remember playing it a lot, but being a little baffled as to what the purpose of the game was.

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Scott C

13/7/2016 10:07:48 am

I too had no idea what I was doing in Ghostbusters on the Spectrum. I put it down to my age when I had a Speccy (7-12), so I watched some YouTube walkthroughs of the games I remembered. Most games were insanely hard or so obscure it was impossible to work out what you were doing (e.g. Zoids). It seems that Ghostbusters might have been designed better, since the walkthrough showed that 8-year-old me had completed the game without even realising it. When you complete it you get a code to enter to start the game again with the pink sports car in place of the hearse (I thought that this was the equivalent of level 2 at the time). Thus, this game stands out as the first game that I ever completed, the next games I completed were Tetris (shuttle/rocket endings in modes A and B) and then Mario Land on the Gameboy.

I grew up with the first one on Atari XL. As Carl0sH said above, pressing space to hear "Ghostbusters!" on the theme song was just awesome.

It's funny how the game that's over 30 years old is the most ambitious of all of them, with resource management bits, and driving, and the ghost catching.

I don't remember ever managing to beat Stay Puft as a kid - had to ask my dad to get past him and complete the game!

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The Keymaster

11/7/2016 05:53:41 pm

Fun fact: ghostbusters was the first game I completed on the c64 mainly due to a glitch that slowed down the increase of the PK meter. Also why no mention of the space invaders clone you could play during the loading sequence?

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do

11/7/2016 07:38:25 pm

Filmation's Ghostbusters "sequel" cartoon was wonderfully bizarre.

You also have to like how Lorenzo Music provided the voice of Bill Murray's character in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, and Murray then voiced Music's character in the Garfield feature films.

The Master System version of the first game seemed like the greatest thing ever when I first played it. It's only when you watch Let's Plays and realise how quickly it was all over, probably for the best given the warbling and unending rendition of the theme song that played throughout. (I could never get my guys inside the last building past the Stay Puft marshmallow man)

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Rakladtor IV

11/7/2016 09:11:59 pm

As any snes fanboy will tell you, the Megadrive's measly 64 colours on screen meant that racial diversity was too much for the hardware to cope with. Thus the megadrive game had to omit Zeddemore

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Chris

11/7/2016 09:16:05 pm

"Exteme" Ghostbusters? :s

So, basically, there are a lot of Ghostbusters games, but they're all essentially the same and we should just go back and play the original one we spent hours on as kids?

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Spiney O'Sullivan

11/7/2016 11:31:54 pm

I actually have a soft spot for the Extreme Ghostbusters. Despite the ludicrous name, I liked the idea of the Ghostbusters handing over the mantle, and Egon and Janine sticking around to mentor a new team. They took a shot at a really diverse cast, while keeping enough connections to the old lot to not totally divorce it from the old show. The animation style was pretty nice too. Slickly gritty and edgy, like the Men in Black cartoon.

Anyway, as for games, the 2009 Ghostbusters game was actually quite fun, if you could forgive the fact it was a bit awkward to control in places, and also you could just outright kill ghosts with the proton beams for some reason (to be fair, trapping every single one would get tedious). It was a bit of a best-of compilation of bits from the films rather than a real sequel, but fun nonetheless.

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Tim Bresnan's Heavy Ball

11/7/2016 10:28:06 pm

I'm sure I had a Ghostbusters II game on the C64 which involved going down a well avoiding/capturing ghosts. It may well have jut been a demo, because that one level was so difficult I never found out if there was another one after it.

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Carp

11/7/2016 11:06:05 pm

Me too. I had the Atari ST version - I think you had to descend into the subway to get a sample of ectoplasm. Never finished the first level. The second level looked nice on the box though.

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Joseph Garcia

13/8/2016 07:18:30 am

What was the ghostbusters game in the arcades around 1992 that used a light gun to shoot ghost targets? Can't find it anywhere, but I have dreams about it all the time. The ghosts lit up orange and you had to shoot them before the light went out. It was very similar to the old Jurassic park light gun game that had the Red, Yellow, and Green lights which you also had to shoot before they went off. The color indicated the difficulty of the shot. What were these kind of games called?